GameDEV

Helldivers II game engine is a discontinued Autodesk Stingray — is it a problem?

Surprisingly, Helldivers II has been built on Autodesk Stingray — the engine discontinued in 2018. There won't be new projects on it since you can no longer get it legally — in 2018 it turned into 3Ds Max plugin and in 2022 even this form was discontinued as well. And players are now concerned if the studio will be able to keep up with the development of such a popular game since their primary tool is dead.

Godot 4, which is still in alpha-testing phase (currently alpha 7), does not yet have the terrain plugin and most of the other useful modules from Godot 3. However, in just a couple of weeks, the developer managed to create his own implementation of a very convincing forest .

DeviantArt notifies artists about NFT-sales of their work – they are often traded without permission

DeviantArt premium subscribers have received notifications that their work is available in NFT format – a way to trade originals of any digital culture by adding a unique crypto-tag to them. This is how the Nyan Cat GIF and the work of 3D artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann - Beeple Crap) were sold. The price tags for such works can reach tens of millions of dollars. Not surprisingly, scammers are trying to capitalize on the popularity of such trading.

Xsolla fired 150 people in Russia, spied on them and sent them an insulting farewell letter

Payment provider Xsolla secretly analyzed the activity of all its employees in Russia due to remote work. And decided to fire about 150 of them because of "low activity", which could be reasonable, but illegal, says HR professionals.

It was expected that Unreal Engine 5 will become available only by the end of this year, but the Epic Games team has pleased us with an amazing announcement – you can try out the preliminary build now. In the meantime, let's figure out what innovations the update has brought!

Godot Engine 4.0 and 3.4 will get the full 64-bit support for files and computations

It took almost two years for the original idea to come together: Godot Engine version 4.0, as well as 3.4 will have the full support for 64-bit files and computations. This means that instead of 2.1 Gigabytes, you will be able to use files up to 9.2 · 10⁹ Gigabytes in size.

The Digital Foundry lab has carried out a detailed analysis of the improved version of Metro Exodus. The original game was one of the first projects with support for ray tracing, and Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition took a step further - the new product does not run on computers without RT-acceleration support. But for the owners of new video cards, a lot of advantages are expected!

Given the popularity of Roblox, it's no surprise that Core Games more advanced 'No-Code' sandbox has united a huge audience in a matter of months. Now the amazing tool is out on the Epic Games Store / EGS. And this is great, because game creators from the community will be able to make money on the new project.

At NVIDIA GTC 2021, the Unity game engine team announced native DLSS support, that will be available for all users since version 2021.2. DLSS is a smart image processing technique to get high resolution output from a low resolution source. The quality is slightly worse, that what native resolution can produce, however, the frame rate rises significantly.

Amazon introduces Atom – new Physically-Based Render for Lumberyard Engine

For over five years, Amazon has been developing its own fork of CryEngine, flavored with AWS services. Over the years, Lumberyard has moved away from its origins and now it's time to change the render: meet a completely new physically-based Atom render.

Free and Open-Source Godot Engine now supports a new amazing lighting system, that will allow developers to create fully dynamic outdoor illumination. It's called SDFGI (signed distance field cascades global illumination) and offers a balance between quality and performance by dividing the screen space to distance cascades with different accuracy.

Night-City un-Wire – Cyberpunk 2077 is delayed... again!

Cyberpunk 2077 has been announced more than 7 years ago. We thought, that babies, born back then, are going to school this year, just before a wide audience will flood the Night-City. But even after all previous delays, it will not be available on September 17 – instead, developers promised to deliver it on November 19.